Bryan Kearney wrote:
I would like to submit for approval an Appliance Operating System (AOS) Spin. This spin is part of the appliance-tools feature [1] and also part of the thincrust project [2]. The Kickstart file can be found in the repo [3] but I have flattened it and attached it to this email.
The goal of this spin is to provide a minimal base upon which software appliances can be built. The main deployment for appliances is expected to be virtual machine, but since there are no kernel changes this could work bare metal as well. This would be the fedora implementation of a JeOS [4].
First of all, it's great to see this "special" spin being submitted for review and possibly being released alongside Fedora 10 as a perfect showcase of how both spins as well as the JeOS or AOS work.
== Name ==
The name I would choose to give to this spin is "Fedora AOS" (at which point the name of the kickstart becomes "fedora-livecd-aos.ks" or possibly just "fedora-live-aos.ks".
== Feature Page ==
The feature page is more extensive then other Spin's feature pages because this particular spin is only part of a feature. To be able to track the Spin Feature separately, we may need a separate AOS Spin Feature page. I'm not sure how other involved parties are seeing this (eg. Feature wrangler / Release Engineering).
Whereas the appliance-tools has additional features compared to livecd-tools, this particular spin is a perfect showcase, and a great way to test whatever it is someone might want to do.
It may need a little clarification though on why a user should use this spin (eg. scope and target audience things).
== Kickstart ==
First of all, since this is a unique spin concept in that it has a specific goal, these notes and corresponding feedback needs to be taken into account by the Spin SIG as well as the spin maintainers...
1) SELinux on this spin is disabled. Although understandable, we would like to see if SELinux could be enabled, or hear about why it is disabled entirely (rather then set permissive). SELinux is a major major feature in Fedora as well as RHEL, so we would like to preserve SELinux as a feature on all spins.
2) A root password is set, which is understandable for real live systems but is not conform the other spin concepts where an additional, normal user is created and the root password is removed. If there is a motivation for setting a root password and not creating a (regular) user in this spin concept, please let us know.
3) the partitioning configuration has --ondisk sda as well as --fstype ext3 which is not taken into account with creating a live spin.
4) the package manifest includes @core, which is included already
5) the kickstart removes fedora-logos, but does not add another logos package, resulting in that fedora-logos still ends up on the image. A minor problem for when the spin is approved by the Board for trademark usage, but you may want to add "generic-logos" to the manifest for now.
6) the network isn't started on boot. Note that the network service does not start on boot by default anymore, in favor of the NetworkManager service, which is not available on this spin, and which I think would also not be favorable to the spin's specific use case.
== Image Size ==
The image size composed against today's rawhide is 117M, which should definitely fit on a CD (~690-700M), or some of the even smaller media for that matter.
Noted the aforementioned issues this overall looks as a great spin to include in the release. Please change or motivate the issues set forth and we'll gladly take another stab at this spin ;-)
Kind regards,
Jeroen van Meeuwen -kanarip